rosscurry / cram

Cram

Ed-tech App leveraging AI & OCR to help students move past breakpoints. Currently configured to help developers learn new technologies, however, I'm working on allowing teachers to upload specific material relevant to each student's curriculum.

Features

The app permits students to take a photo of a topic related to the backend, such as Koa, Node, Express, etc, with which they are currently struggling. From the photo the app fetches information related to that relevant topic, so far including: a tutorial video, bullet points and some other closely related topics.

Tech Stack

A combination of React-Native with Expo has been used to build the user interface. While on the backend the app levages GraphQL with ApolloClient to leverage queries to a seeded database containing information on each topic.

Front end

React-Native Expo Typescript

Back end

ApolloClient GraphQL MongoDB Mongoose

System Requirements

NodeJS v15 or greater npm v7.5 or greater

Getting Started

To get up and running it’s first necessary to install all dependencies. This will install both the client and server dependencies for you.

git clone https://github.com/romduda/cram.git Run npm i – this will install dependencies in both the client and server folders.

Setting up the backend

Seeding the database

As mentioned the backend works off of a seeded database. This is a script available in the backend. So from the server folder in terminal run:

npm run seed

Google Vision ApiKey

The image processing is handled by Google’s Vision API. To get this working you will have to register an account with google and obtain an apiKey. Once acquired you will have to create an apiKey.json file in the scr folder of the server to store it in.

Environment variables

PORT is the only environment variable needed on the backend. Create a .env file in the server folder and store your port number there. See .env.example.

Running the server

npm run start-dev Once all the other steps have been completed, from the src folder in the terminal run

node index.js

or, if nodemon is installed (recommended)

npm run start dev

Setting up the frontend

Environment variables

There are two environment variables to set up on the frontend: APOLLOCLIENT_HOST and APOLLOCLIENT_PORT. You can run ipconfig getifaddr en0 in the terminal to find out your IP address.

Running the client

expo start

or

npm run start